Discord Addams made it to the top six of RuPaul's Drag Race season 18, and she left with her head held high. The queen, who became one of the season's most talked-about contestants thanks to her now-iconic runway walk, was eliminated during the makeover challenge, but don't expect her to spend too much time dwelling on it.
"I was happy, like not happy that I got sent home, but I was happy in everything that I did," she told Newsweek. "I made it to the top six, which icons such as Trixie Mattel, Alyssa Edwards, Monet Exchange, Nina West, like all the girls whose names you remember were sixth place."
The queen had a strong run leading up to her elimination, never once landing in the bottom or having to lip sync for her life until the end. Her Snatch Game performance, as the Pope, in particular stood out as a season highlight, with Discord saying it was her favorite day on set. "I had RuPaul cry laughing, and that's one of the things you go into Drag Race wanting to see," she said. "The cameraman couldn't even look at me without laughing."
But it was her walk, that gloriously stiff, shoulders-back, chin-up strut, that turned Discord into a meme-worthy sensation. The origin story is more intentional than it might appear. A self-described "pleaser girl," referring to the type of shoes she wears, who favors eight-to-ten inch platform shoes, Discord credits her boyfriend with drilling the walk into her muscle memory. "He put me on a treadmill and put a bunch of 90s runway videos in front of me and told me to just do that," she said. "In my mind I was Naomi Campbell, deadass serious."
RuPaul apparently saw the potential immediately. "She told me never, ever, ever change this," Discord said. "This walk is gonna make you famous. People are gonna be walking up to you doing this walk." She trusted that instinct, and the internet did the rest.
Discord also proved she knew how to monetize the moment. When "safety pin gate" erupted after the judges and fellow queens critiqued her look, she dropped safety pin merchandise the same day. "I made five thousand dollars in 24 hours," she said. "There's just nothing bad happening if you don't let bad things happen."
As for the makeover challenge that sent her home, Discord was candid about where she thinks the judging missed the mark. The challenge asked queens to transform their assigned partners, in this case queer cowboys from a gay rodeo, into their drag sisters. Discord maintains that she and her partner genuinely looked like siblings on that runway. "We saw with our own two eyeballs that me and Colton looked like siblings," she said, pushing back on the judges' critique that the family resemblance wasn't there.
She acknowledged one area where the criticism could have landed more fairly. "If they would have critiqued me on my outfit not being as up to par as my past runways, I would have been on board with that," she said. "But because the critiques were 'it's not giving family relation,' that's where I had a hard time wrapping my brain around it, because that was objectively not true."
Discord also reflected on a dynamic that may have worked against her: her quieter, more focused presence in the workroom. When the safety pin drama played out, she was caught off guard by the confessional commentary from her castmates. "Nobody voiced that concern to me in the workroom," she said. "I'm just quiet and focused, and that's just how I've been my whole life. I think sometimes that comes across as rude, or just not like a girls girl, and that's not necessarily the case."
Still, Discord Addams leaves season 18 as one of its most memorable queens, the kind of contestant whose moments cut through the noise and stick. She earned it, and she knows it. "It's one thing to go home on a challenge that you bombed," she said. "But I didn't bomb this challenge by any stretch of the imagination."